Get Paid to Use Your Smartphone

You already look at your smartphone about 84,000 times a day — why not make some money doing it?

A new app called Locket, which launched last week for Android, pays users to rent out their phone’s lock screens to advertisers. The idea comes from a New York City-based startup, backed with hefty funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital. It’s pretty simple: you tell the app your age, gender and location and it uses your phone as a billboard by feeding you relevant ads, ABC News reports. And then after that, it’s up to you: you can swipe in one direction to skip the ad and go directly to your home screen, or you can swipe in another direction to go to the company’s website, Facebook page or video for more information. Either way, you’ll get paid one cent per swipe.

Right now, potential earnings are capped at three cents per hour. That doesn’t exactly sound like much, but if you constantly check your phone throughout the day (as so many of us do), you could rack up a decent amount of cash over the course of a year. The money you earn gets saved within your Locket account, which you can then redeem through PayPal. The Locket team told ABC News that they’re also working on ways to redeem the money through gift cards and allow users to donate it to charity. But the company’s goals aren’t purely monetary. The team ultimately hopes to improve how we interact with advertisements on our devices.

“What we’re trying to do is change the perception people have towards ads. On mobile, ads suck right now,” co-founder Yunha Kim told TechCrunch. “But our ads are different because they’re beautiful and they actually reward you for your glances.”